The Fact of Myth and the Myth of Fact

Is there something more than conspiracy theories that deny facts and with them, historical reality, loose in our culture today? We have seen the erosion, if not the demeaning, of facts in the past four years, often substituted by theories, hunches, and fantasies riding hard over facts.

I returned to a book I had read 32 years ago to search out why this new phenomenon’s popularity by so many: the physicist and former president of The University of Dallas, Donald Cowan’s profound study, Unbinding Prometheus: Education for the Coming Age (1988) for a historical perspective.

If we allow that a myth, personal or collective, consists of a world view, understood as a mixture of values, beliefs, opinions, thoughts, feelings, ideas, that give our lives both coherence and meaning, then myths are organic entities that have a fluidity about them and can change, migrate and even be replaced by new revisions and editions of what we believe. Our myths are the stories we tell ourselves in order to support a particular way of processing what we loosely call Reality. I offer this short description to introduce what Cowan considers “the myth of fact,” which he suggested then is “the prevailing myth of the modern age.”  

This myth had a long run in the imagination of the West, lasting, he claims, about 400 years. Its foundation was a “rational structure erected on facts,” and gave authority to facts over opinions, beliefs, hunches and intuitions about what was true. He is clearer about its dynamics when he writes: “a fact, we should remember, is a phenomenon taken as truth—a communal event, not a subjective awareness or an article of faith.” With the rise and acceptance of this myth, the world that could be observed, its phenomenal reality verifiable, “assumed a reality not subject to bias.”

The power and authority of facts were engendered by their capacity to measure, at times predict, what might be based squarely on what is. “Measurement was its instrument,” Cowan writes, and in time this quality became more accurate and precise. Science itself became the new benchmark for understanding the world through its ability to measure it. It became the go-to mythology to settle what is most approximate to truth.

At one point in history, the assumption was that the myth of fact would remain in authority for an unlimited period of time. And it has, up to the current moment in history; no longer are we communally able to believe in its old authority, when “even in crisis we do give authority over to facts beyond their immediate demands.” No one political, economic or religious group engendered this move away from fact and towards more outlandish fantasies; the erosion of facts began, Cowan reveals, with the development of Theoretical Physics, including The Uncertainty Principle (1927) the Theory of Relativity (1905) and other new beliefs that showed that the world was not able to be understood in all its multiplicity and mystery by facts alone.

Why is this worth understanding? Because the erosion of the myth of fact did not originate with the last administration sowing discord through fabrications of the real. Or the current sideways thinking that populates the conspiracy matrix today, although it encouraged such aberrations. Myths by their nature, seem not to show their shifting tectonic plates until an earthquake, big or small, rises to the surface to shake us all from our moorings, pleasing some and panicking others.

We are now nationally and globally between myths that will continue to effect the entire species. What do the pandemics of viruses and pandemics of thought and beliefs have to teach us today? I believe that the new myth can be seen in the folds and creases of both of these, as well as in the powerful movements towards a more just world. Watch these events for the new myth to emerge, perhaps the Myth of a More Just Equilibrium.

The Decent Society: A Way Forward

Published in New Braunfels’ Herald-Zeitung January 2021.

In the wake of the moving and heart-stirring Inauguration were planted the seeds of a new level of integration of our disparate and at time desperate parts of our national soul. It stirred a memory in me, of a book I had begun reading some time ago that inspired me then. I retrieved it from my bookshelf and picked up where I had left off: Rabbi Avishai Margalit’s The Decent Society. The word “decent” has meant, in its origins, “tasteful,” “proper,” “becoming,” “to be fitting or suitable.” Decency claims a right-ful place in any society, especially deeply-afflicted ones.

Margalit reveals that “a decent society is one that does not humiliate or wrest self-control from its weakest members.” To humiliate or demean another, he claims, is “a painful evil.” A decent society “does not injure the civic honor belonging to it.” In such a society, there are no second-class citizens—those who have been shoveled to the margins, whose relative absence of power and position are used against them for personal or corporate gain. How leaders of a people decide to discriminate “in the distribution of goods and services is a form of humiliation.”

We can and have, as a people today, deny selected others “civic privileges,” and by doing so, keep them in place as we have defined their assignment.

What keeps or retards a society from becoming more decent—and perhaps the goal of democracy is less to “form a more perfect union” but to form a more decent union in which all are given opportunities to rise to their most gratifying potentials.

My sense today is that we have at this critical crossroads, this threshold in the political swing of things, a chance to decide whether to stay secure in our silos of sour hearts and prejudiced persuasions, or to engage with all of our talents and innate decencies to enrich the lives and spirits of all of us, for a change, in order to change. Dreams we hold can become nightmares that hold us—back from using the pandemic, economic and psychological crises we are entangled in, to create something new, not desecrate the human possibilities we are.

Allowing ourselves to be inspirited by new attitudes towards our noble natures and at least acknowledge the darkness that resides in each of us, known or not, can lead to leaving our guns at home, both the literal guns we own and the metaphorical guns we aim at others because they differ from us. My poem below is an attempt to express this desire:

Leave Your Gun At Home

Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough.
—George Washington Carver

If you wish to see the other in
you striding beside your shadow
Leave your gun at home.
If you desire friendship with a stranger
in conversing on topics you share
Leave your gun at home.
If you seek in the folds of a friendship
the virtues of acceptance love and warmth
in the oven of meetings
Leave your gun at home.
If when driving, walking, talking
or teaching
you seek an open response to all
you profess
Leave your gun at home.
For in the pistol’s presence and the
bullets that zing from your mouth
and the full chambers of your heart
and the hammer of a quick response
full of leaden love
and the trigger of a twisted phrase
The other dies in front of you because
in your scattered hail of reports
You brought your gun from home.

Belief's Power and Fragility

Published in New Braunfels’ Herald-Zeitung January 22-23, 2021.

What has surfaced and demanded attention in this period of our national history is the crisis of belief. I was impressed with Jim Sohan’s letter in “Voices” (Dec. 12-13, 5-A) in the Herald Zeitung, “Time to Stop Being Silent.” Referencing fledgling democracies in the world, he wrote: “The foundation of those democratic institutions is the belief of the public that elections are free and fair. . . .” Belief as foundation, belief as base line. We have a natural impulse or instinct to believe in something. Why? Is a fascinating question.

It seems, in the period we are slogging through today, that a belief rests less on its being true than on its level of emotional value and persuasion for an individual or a people. Whatever each of us accumulates in our storehouses of beliefs will in fact shape the story we live by. In other words, our personal narrative, regardless of how much or little we reflect on it, is an amalgam of what we believe, sense, intuit, assume, accept, and reject about what we loosely call “reality.” The efficacy of a belief is highlighted most often by how much affect or emotional response it elicits from its adherents.

When any of our beliefs calcify into an ideology that “this is the truth,” rather than “this is my perception of what is true,” then out of that stance often arises resentments, denials,  and violent responses to what others have settled on what is true for them. Acceptance, or even tolerance of another’s angle on “reality,” transports us in a different direction.

Things become more complex when the phenomenon of fact is introduced into the argument over what is true. In his insightful book on revising education, Unbinding Prometheus: Education for the Coming Age, physicist Donald Cowan writes of “the myth of fact,” which he claims has been “the prevailing myth of the modern age.” Fair enough. But he then points out an historical move that I think may be responsible for the conspiracy theories enjoying a heyday today.

He suggests that the myth of fact shifted in the early Renaissance [14th century Italy] in a substantial way: “In it the observable objects of the world came to exist in their own right. Rather than taking their meaning from a context. . . in order to participate in a larger reality, facts began to be considered the unchallengeable substance of life. . ..”

What evolved has come down to us as “facts speak for themselves.” They can be measured and verified and trusted as entities to believe in. But we have entered a different mode of our relationship to facts. “Fact-checking” has become necessary to counter the dizzy world of “alternative facts.” Facts are then weakened in their ability for many to believe in.

When facts lose their contexts, their veracity diminishes; facts in large measure help us to construct our narratives that shape our identities. But if facts are relativized, so at its core is reality itself. If individuals and groups or nations are no longer certain what or who to believe in, their identity as a coherent and cohesive body with shared senses of purpose and ideals to pursue are orphaned.

May the new year allow us to find a tolerant, accepting level of accommodation for one another as we struggle through the pandemic and the pandemonium of our recent past in order to forge a future we can all believe. Through communal generosity we can retrieve it. Only then can we each participate in a shared myth that bequeaths us a formed set of facts to embrace as our image of the real.

A Mythic Crossroads: Which Will We Choose?

Published in New Braunfels’ Herald-Zeitung December 12-13, 2020.

So many of us are trying to make sense of what has ensued after the election, but little of the discussion has implicated what a mythic shift in consciousness is taking place. Think for a moment of the power of myth in this illustration by mythologist Sam Keen: “A myth can make a cow sacred in one culture and hamburger meat in another.” Same animal,  yet very different beliefs surrounding our bovine friends.

In this sense, democracy is a myth, namely, not a lie, as some claim, but rather a set of values and beliefs and attitudes that express a relationship between the individual, the society one lives within, and the larger environment. Simply put, a myth is what we choose to believe in that gives our life coherence, if not meaning and purpose. A life without a myth is a life without meaning. But the myth we live in often remains underground, out of sight, but still very influential in shaping what we think and what we do. Until the myth is challenged, attacked or attempted to be erased. That is where we are today.

Our myth of a democratic society is shaped by three documents: The Constitution, the Preamble to The Declaration of Independence and the Declaration itself, which is our most forceful myth statement. These documents state the myth that shaped our democracy. Within them are listed a set of “rights” but with these rights it seems that attached to them are certain responsibilities. One without the other is ineffectual if one wishes to maintain and defend the myth. As with personal myths held by each of us, there is this larger national myth that breeds coherence, a sense of unity and belonging, and national purpose. If we treasure the myth that reflects us, we will each do our part to maintain it. If we fracture and divide into camps, the myth will lose its cohering power. The written documents that grew originally from its inception gave shape and form to the myth. It also connects us to history—so an intimate correlation  exists between history and mythology; they are partners.

As mythologist Joseph Campbell asserted, myths grow from the imagination itself. “It has to do with how you live your life, and to connect what’s seems true to actual lived experience.” I think his observation is valid on both individual and collective levels. They put us in touch with what is beyond us, what we aspire to and instill in us the energy needed to approximate it. Voting, for example, is a  ritual, by which we embody and act on the myth that has defined us.

But today it seems that the myth of democracy, with its mysterious and fragile core element of human freedom, is being challenged by the myth of individualism. Campbell believes this latter myth is fine so long as people realize that they “are representing something” that one “is still the agent of something and [they are] a presence. But when the individual is acting only for himself or for his family. . . then you have nothing but chaos.”

The point here is that any political figure especially, is a representative of some ideal or vision beyond themselves. When that collapses in a democracy, then any person who has been elected by the people for the best interests of the people turns inward to use that position to satisfy personal appetites; under such stress the  democratic myth may need a respirator to survive. Such personal appetites violate the myth that put them in office to serve something well beyond themselves, something transcendent—the life principle of the people who elected them.    

Commentary: How We Can Harness and Share Compassion

For the San Antonio Express-News, November 25, 2020

The word “compassion” entered the fringes of social discourse years ago and has now moved closer to the center of discussion for many. Etymologically, its history reaches back to ancient periods. In Greek, “compassion” had its origin in the noun “patient,” or “one who suffers.” It is also connected to “patiens,” from the Greek “paskhein,” “to suffer.”

In the biblical sense, compassion means “someone else’s heartbreak becomes your heartbreak.” In Latin, as well, it carries the same sense of getting out of one’s own preoccupations and placing the other before one’s self.

I recall hearing the word gathering steam when the biblical scholar Karen Armstrong gave a national TED talk in 2008 on compassion. She then convened a group of global religious and lay individuals to begin a Charter for Compassion in 2009. Her request in the talk included the following: “I wish that you would help with the creation, launch and propagation of a Charter for Compassion, crafted by a group of leading inspirational thinkers from the three Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and based on the fundamental principles of universal justice and respect.”

From that initial establishment of a global initiative she wrote and published what is becoming a classic text on compassion: “Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life.” Resonating, of course, earlier 12-step recovery programs that have helped millions heal from addictions, resentments, prejudices and other afflictions that narrow our worldview and often keep compassion at bay.

The steps range from “The First Step: Learn About Compassion” to “The Twelfth Step: Love Your Enemies.” I found “The Third Step: Compassion for Yourself” particularly enlightening. She quotes Rabbi Albert Friedlander, who grew up in Nazi Germany and as a child was confused “by the vicious anti-Semitic propaganda” that pervaded the atmosphere of that moment in history. What his experiences taught Armstrong is “if you cannot love yourself, you cannot love other people either.”

Recently, the 30th Anniversary Edition of Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey was revised and republished. It has been translated into 14 languages. I was pleased with how often the word “compassion” was a part of her discussion of women who had never allowed themselves to step out from the shadows of a controlling mother or a “father’s daughter” role. When she relates what a powerful experience she had participating in a five-day retreat for high school seniors, she concludes: “The compassion we experienced together will enable each one of us to move closer to understanding diversity, rather than being threatened by it.”

More recently, one of the leaders of a current “men’s movement,” writer and retreat leader Clay Boykin, a former Marine Corps artillery officer and a former Park Avenue executive, told me he suffered a heart attack several years ago. That crisis pushed him to re-evaluate his life and make a decision about his purpose: to explore the compassionate male. His 2018 book, Circles of Men: A Counter-Intuitive Approach to Creating Men’s Groups, creates a template for the development of the Men’s Fellowship Network, which is based on a particular model that has had the most success of the many he researched. He bases his book’s structure on what he calls “The Twelve Secrets.”

The first secret: “Language Matters—Be mindful of how you speak about your circle and within it.” The 12th secret: “Transformation—It is what seekers are seeking.” Throughout his insightful ideas about forming men’s groups, he urges compassion be shown by each man to every other man in the retreat circle. Vulnerability is, Boykin writes, “the greatest obstacle to man’s spiritual growth,” so compassion is always in the center of the circle when men gather.

The interest and effectiveness of practicing compassion continue to grow personally, communally and politically.

Does All Learning Have to be Useful?

Published in the New Braunfels’ Herald-Zeitung, November 21-22, 2020.

Two of our particularly American myths are: the economic myth and the myth of utility or usefulness. The conventional wisdom is that students enroll in higher education programs with the aim of finding suitable employment. Such an attitude, such a mythic understanding of “learning for the sake of earning” has been imbedded deeply into our belief system. But learning was not always inflected along that rather narrow corridor, however valuable it is.

A recent publication challenges these baked-in beliefs: Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life (2020) which is certain to stir controversy. It is one signal of the success of a book if it can do so. Its author, Zena Hitz, winner of The Hiett Prize offered by the Dallas Institute for promising young scholars in the humanities, teaches in the great books program at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. At one point she became so disillusioned with higher education that she retreated from it and entered a monastery for three years. There she carefully reevaluated her thinking about the deeper values of why we learn, beyond job acquisition and economics.         

In one of her chapters, “Learning, Leisure, and Happiness,” she poses two fundamental questions asked by few: “What does learning look like, stripped of its trappings of fame, prestige, fortune, and social use? In other words, how is it good for its own sake, because of its effect on the learner rather than because of its outward results?” Reading good books in many fields, from the ancients’ exploration of what makes us human in all of our complexity, to more contemporary works in philosophy, theology, mathematics, literature and politics, can open us to the deeper dimensions of who we are as unique human beings in a culture that is more comfortable with consuming, striving for more and greater, and seeking the new and latest for a variety of reasons.

Not many educators that I have known or read have made the claim offered by Hitz; she unabashedly claims that learning, which is one of the deepest instincts in our species, has the capacity to generate joy. To learn, is to learn to enjoy being ourselves, being human and most importantly, learning the art of reflection on our life’s journey. One condition that helps to promote these features is, of course, being willing for brief periods of time to be in solitude, which is not the same as being lonely. Being busy often keeps this tendency or need at a safe distance. In my own life, to embrace solitude is the only place from which I can think and write. Then, being with others is actually more, not less, joyful.

Chapter 3, “The Uses of Uselessness,” offers a counter-myth  when so much in our lives is measured and valued to the degree that it has “use.” Here she addresses a modern trend--the idea that learning for its own sake and joy, has “been traded for learning for social utility, for the sake of ‘making a difference.’” Yet, not without irony, the notion of learning as useless carries with it a use: “the value of intellectual life lies in its broadening and deepening of our humanity. . . [which] begins in the readers’ or the inquirers’ deep engagement with learning, their assumption of their responsibility of being transformed by what they learn, . . .”

Hitz’s inspiring study resists the threadbare slogan in academe that studying the humanities promotes critical thinking. While not wrong, it is too narrow. Hitz suggests that learning can transform the individual, which is itself a form of social activism, so that learning more deeply about who one truly is can have profound and positive effects on the society at large.

A Sampling of Essay Titles for a New Collection of Writing

Mything Links: The Subtle Wisdom of Stories

Or

Give Them Names: Tapping the Wellsprings of Myth

Not sure which way to go with the title; still fluid.

I am using this critical time of the Covid Virus spread to create a new volume of essays. Some of them have been published in journals and in newspapers as Op-Ed pieces; others have been delivered at conferences or on-line but have not bee published; others were written to be delivered but the event was cancelled. Some are earlier film and book reviews that I particularly like. A few consist of multiple pages of notes I took in order to write an article on the topic but never returned to them. Now is the right time to turn the notes into a coherent essay.

I thought you might like to read a few of the titles.

Part I:  untitled

“Tender Mercies and the Quest for Wholeness.” Film review

“The Lighthouse: Prosperos’ Playground.” Film Review

“Moby-Dick as Figure in the Field: Mythmaking as Soul-Saving.”

“Envy’s Corrosive Consequences: Dante’s Purgatorio.”

“Riting Myth: Spiral and Memory.”

“The Things They Carried: Notes on the Nature of Story.” Compiled notes on Tim O’Brien’s record of his experiences in Vietnam.

“Reading and the Mythopoeic Imagination.”

 Part II: untitled

“Poetics of Myth.”

“Temenos of Imagination: Classroom as Sacred Surprise.”

“Peace is an Attitude: Seeing into the Invisibles.”

“From Resentment to Love.”

“Pornography Does Not Stop with Sexploitation.”

“Being Certain About Uncertainty.”

The total number of essays will be 24, give-or-take a couple. Currently the manuscript, which I will begin to compile, edit and rewrite now that I have the chosen essays, is 314 pp. I include in that a Foreword by yet-to-be-determined and a short Introduction by me.

I have never spoken about a book of mine in progress, but Toni D’Anca convinced me that it would be of interest to some who visit my website. I trust Toni’s instincts without reservations, so here it is.

If any of you is interested in letting me know what of the two titles listed above has more appeal, I would love to hear from you. Titles are tricky and essential to get right, as any of you know who has written an essay, a poem, a dissertation, a published book or a painting or photograph. Titles set the tone for what is to come, so I welcome your opinion.

Many thanks for taking a look. I am glad that I am posting this now for your consideration. Many blessings to you all.

Conversation in a Digital Age: The Core of Civilization

Reading the following title made me pause and think about the power of the cell phone: Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age by Sherry Turkle. Published in 2016, her research and discoveries are astonishing and even more relevant today. Working with young people in schools, she has measured how texting, emails, and other technological means of communication have lowered the level of empathy one feels for another and others. The smart phone, she believes, has altered not only behavior with one another, but the prospect of intimacy itself. Smart phones sit at the dinner table and restaurants like an additional guest, face- up, ready to be pounced on when it rings or buzzes; fear of boredom is the major player among 18-24 year olds, Turkle has discovered, so the computer or cell phone is the instant escape from solitude, being alone or feeling bored, isolated, and left out. It is also the default corridor to escape conversation.

Her research reveals that the technology we lionize is also the technology that can silence us, especially in muffling conversation, either on the phone or face-to-face. Her subjects tell her that they would rather text someone than talk to them directly. Fear of “not getting it right” is the main reason offered for not wanting to have a conversation with another: one might say something and get it wrong. There is no time to edit or to control the communication when it is “live.” She uses the image that far from conversing more, we connect more; connection overrides conversing;  consequently, we can find ourselves in a “technological cockpit,” isolated from any ideas, notions, feelings or beliefs that do not agree with our own. Conversation, real conversing, throws one into ambiguity, into a place where ideas take on their own life, and are less controllable and at times less agreeable.  But the trade-off can also lead to new insights and realizations not considered before. Giving up controlling process or outcomes is essential.

She insists that there is hope in retrieving conversation, which is directly linked to civilization. Civilization brings up its beginning word, civility. Bullying, Turkle suggests, especially on-line bullying, may be experiencing such an acceleration because one does not see the other person’s reactions, his/her feelings, or the trauma incited.  Empathy is erased or sharply abridged by technology because the other person is not present in an embodied way, nor can their emotions be experienced.

Conversation moves in another direction: it promotes intimacy and uncertainty; in conversation one is not fighting to be right or to win, but to understand the point of view of another and one’s own, more fully.  “Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. We attend to tone and nuance. When we communicate on our digital devices, however, we learn different habits…. We dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters. And we become accustomed to a life of constant interruption” (p. 35) that allows only the briefest of sound-bytes. Conversation needs duration and durability. Real conversation, not passing information back and forth, can serve as “a crucible for discovery” (p. 37). Ideas “come from speaking.” What matters most in conversation is risky. “The thrill of “risky talk” comes from being in the presence of and in close connection to your listener.” One gives up control and allows ideas to have their own way, to see where they lead, and what connections might be stirred in the crucible of time and duration, not in the pauses between constant interruption.

Turkle’s research reveals that the average adult checks his/her phone every 6.5 minutes; teenagers send an average of 100 texts per day. 80% sleep with their phones and will check them when they roll over during a night’s sleep; 44% never unplug from their devices” (p. 42). My guess is that these stats are far too conservative today, 2020. The behavior is both compulsive and addictive. Instead of spurning interruptions, we then tend to welcome them to keep the wolf of boredom at bay.

Stillness is eliminated; solitude turns to loneliness and terrifies; we multi-task and concentrate on something for only a few minutes or even seconds. Our lives can easily become scattered and so full of busyness that at the end of the day we are left with little to reflect on; in fact, reflection, a first cousin to conversation, seems a lost art. The end result is a shallow and incomplete sense of who we even are as a person. One may feel a growing dread of living an incoherent life.

Perhaps more than a little of the brutality we see today in human interactions is a direct mirroring of how technology is insisting and training us how to relate to one another.

Nonetheless, Turkle remains hopeful; she believes we can reclaim conversation, and with it an earlier form of intimacy, community and basic human respect for one another’s point of view without necessarily acquiescing to it. Listening is often enough because the other feels heard. Shrill attacks on what another thinks or believes reduces our humanness and with it, civilization itself is dealt a wounding blow. True conversation is one of those rare win-win human delights. Not winners and losers.

Facing Our Fears: Pan, the Pandemic and Politics

The god Pan in Greek mythology is a curious deity. As a loner in the mountains of Greece, he spent his time seducing the nymphs of the forest and generally alarming and terrifying folks living on farms, villages and cities. Because he was not often seen, his howlings and growlings disturbed all those who heard him; he was the great disruptor of ordinary life from family to nations. Whenever we feel collectively an overwhelming sense of fear, of threat, of vulnerability, whether it be to our values, our beliefs or our way of life, our first instinct may well be to panic. Then our shields go up.

Fear, a cousin, or maybe brother to panic, can also be a corrosive presence to our thinking and responding to what threatens. I have been thinking of how much the stories we are hearing today are mainly fear-based and stoked often by mis, dis, and wrong information. In-formation may easily coalesce into fear-formation, with responses to it being seemingly senseless acts of violence. Both panic and fear are forms of terrorism in themselves and cultivate responses often devoid of reason or even calm common sense.

I returned to a book that a former professor of mine wrote years ago: Robert Sardello’s Freeing the Soul From Fear (1999). It could have been published yesterday, for the conditions that incite fear are universal and timeless. We often don’t think about being afraid as an opportunity for self-reflection personal growth, but Robert does. Let me share a few of his insights about Fear, an emotion that vibrates around us intensely today.

When Fear becomes one of the major stories in our lives, we may begin to live a decentered life; we are pulled out of ourselves in fear.

Retreating to prejudices is one common way that individuals deal with Fear. The word “prejudice” means to pre-judge, to judge without facts or correct information. It is a comforting place to retreat to in the face of being afraid.

Fear exposes each of us to judgements that can, in times of calm, be seen as irrational and disconnected from the reality we feared, and can actually feed the furnace of Fear burning within us.

Fear disturbs the flexible boundary between me and the world.

From Robert’s observation above, I would add that Fear makes us rigid, self-enclosed, an insulated system that feeds on its own toxic juices.

If we approach Fear by hoping to stop it through external means alone, we are probably using the wrong tools. Some deeper response must come from within us.

As Robert understands it, the soul needs time to take things in; it cannot be hurried. When bombarded with one sequence of events after another, with little depth or understanding accompanying it, then Fear enters us and becomes its own tyrant, stoking itself into greater control over our thinking.

Fear creates a disposition towards obsessions, compulsions and other forms of non-reflective thoughts and actions. They in turn dull consciousness and the ability to reflect.

What might be an antidote to a fear-based individual or culture? Robert suggests several. He believes that the human imagination itself is a moral force, one which can free us from a Fear-based pattern of reacting and begin to respond with compassion and love, first for oneself. Developing an inner silence while observing the outer world can also cultivate a calm understanding attitude that takes the wind out of Fear’s sails.

Cultivating as well a spirit of patience, waiting, and receptivity can begin to counteract the urges of our instincts and passions. Thought is an antidote to the impulses of the instincts and compassion is an antibody to our passions.

What is Mything in Your Life?

It is unfortunate that in our current world the word “myth” is still maligned as something that is a lie, untrue, and opposed to “fact.” Myth is something to be done away with because it is counter to what is true. The irony here is that such a definition of myth grew out of a period in history when fact, measurement, and quantification were seen as the only way of measuring reality. That in itself is a myth, namely a belief system, a way of seeing and understanding that shoved myth to the sidelines. It has no standing in our nation’s educational curriculum.  

Before the rise of reason, of quantifying and the like, myths were the preferred way to knowledge. Simply put, the word myth means story, narrative and for thousands of years humans told one another stories to impart what had happened to them, what they had learned and even their desires  and hopes for the future. Just as importantly, the language of myth is metaphor, symbol, figures of speech, images. I like how one writer I enjoy reading put it: “A myth is a loom on which we weave the raw materials of daily experience into a coherent story.” We can all grasp with a little reflection the power of this metaphor.

The key word above is “coherence.” A myth, be it personal or collective, brings the disparate parts of our life together into a meaningful whole. Without such a coherent meaning, our lives are full of holes. And with coherence another element is included: meaning. A life without meaning is a life without a coherent myth. Some have called myths belief systems. That works.

To access one’s myth, one can ask:  what am I called to in this life? What is my destiny, my purpose and my path? To answer such questions is to invite one’s myth into the conversation. Most people do not know the myth they are living, or get only glimpses in times of disruption. Illness, surgery, loss of a relationship, family, a job, a purpose for living—all of these can force one to pause and ask: what am I doing in this life? What is not any longer working for me and where do I need to change? Again, these are mythic questions. Not only individuals but nations can find themselves at an impasse where they reach a critical point in what they believe and begin to reflect on its basic values. Values are one of many ways that a myth reveals its presence.

The most popular mythologist of the last century was Joseph Campbell (1904-87). As a comparative mythologist, he spent his life comparing world mythologies and noticed the common terms that so many of them shared. He was also one of the few that understood the power of the media to disseminate not just information but knowledge. His 6 part series on PBS, “The Power of Myth,” in conversation with Bill Moyers is still among the most viewed programs on public television. His book of the same name is a bedrock text for grasping the ways that we are both living a myth and being lived by a myth.

All myths, Campbell believed, are metaphors for actions and events in both our interior life and the external world we move in each day; both can aid us in becoming more aware of life’s meaning. “Follow Your Bliss” reached bumper sticker status years ago.  By this he meant follow the path that arises within you, that serves a constructive purpose, rather than following a path dictated to you. If you do, you are living another’s myth, not yours. But he was no sentimentalist; he believed following one’s bliss created its own unique assortment of blisters.

Some of the current myths that govern our country include: the myth of growth, the myth of economics, the myth of technology, the myth of consumption, the myth of safety, the myth of self-protection as well as some form of the myths of equality, freedom and opportunity. Our myths reveal themselves most pointedly in the political and advertising worlds. Of course, what shows find their way into our television sets and movie theaters are also good barometers of our values. Look at any country and not what holidays they celebrate together and you get a pulse read on what myths they believe in, even if only partially. A wonderful short story by the American writer Shirley Jackson entitled “The Lottery,” reveals what happens when belief in a myth has been lost, disavowed or forgotten, but the rituals that once organically supported it continue to be practiced. Violence is the consequence. Her entire story can be read on-line.

When a myth that has heretofore united a people begins to dismantle into tribal myths that divide rather than maintain an essential unity, that myth is stressed and strained, perhaps into distorted forms of itself. When a myth is called into question it may need to be revised and/or reasserted with exceptional vigor. Such a crisis can be a signal that parts of a myth need to be rethought, let go of, or revitalized. Being reflective rather than reactionary about this condition can be constructive and replenishing. Being mythically aware is an essential element of being fully human.

Exploring Thoughts On Tyranny

It does not happen with the frequency which it used to that I impulse-buy a book in a bookstore, even one at a national airport that often carries  both a surprising variety of classics and contemporary fiction and non-fiction. It is a very small book with a very BIG title: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) by Timothy Snyder. Snyder is a well-known and acclaimed cultural historian. Two of his many other titles are Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning and Ukrainian History, Russian Policy and European Futures.

“Tyranny” is a big word with many barbs spinning off of it. The word feels as big as the Titanic, so lumbering and unmanageable, so I wanted to see what Snyder had to say about its meaning and its presence in the world today; I bought it and read it on my flight home and subsequently. Each of the twenty lessons appears on its own page with a paragraph in bold beneath: some samples: 1. Do not obey in advance; 5. Remember professional ethics; 9. Be kind to our language;  12. Make eye contact and small talk; 15. Contribute to good causes. But # 10 caught and held my eye: Believe in truth. His first observation followed: “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis on which to do so.”

From there he highlights four elements that hook into the death of truth, according to Victor Klemperer, a scholar and historian who wrote diaries during the powerful rise of the Third Reich; his many works are considered reliable eye witnesses of that regime and others in Germany:  “Open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts.” Confusion arises when the facts of events are continually hijacked by fabrications which in turn breeds confusion as to what to believe. The truth begins to bleed out.

“Shamanistic incantation.” “Endless repetition,” according to Klemperer, “is designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable.” Nicknames, stereotyping individuals, referring to them as “lyin” or “crooked” or “slimy” and repeated endlessly can give many non reflective people the sense that these illusions are the reality to embrace.

“Magical Thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. Such occurs when people listen to and accept two realities that cannot exist at the same time, as with the presidential promise of “cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating national debt and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense.” These promises undercut one another and cannot be made into a defensible reality. George Orwell coined a term for this kind of dizzying version of reality: “doublespeak” became the strategy in Ninety Eighty Four to create alternate forms of existence by assaulting any form of shared reality that was not constructed by those moving into or who had attained power.

“Misplaced faith.” Here one attempts to self-deify, to make one seem a god who can perform the impossible, alone. “I alone can solve it,” or “I am your voice,” or “I am the committee.” What is attacked on this level of truth-killing are “the small truths of our individual discernment and experience.” We are no longer encouraged to believe in our own validity or those that our experiences teach us. We give them up to the authorities.

While the entirety of Snyder’s book reveals how history shows us that this same game plan has been used repeatedly in the past, seeing it within the historical context he outlines I found very helpful. And like a slow-moving ocean liner, sometimes its motion is hardly detectable. History shows us NOW what was THEN.

A NEW BOOK. An Obscure Order: Reflections on Cultural Mythologies

This new collection of essays contains presentations delivered at conferences or published in other venues, but never gathered into one volume. The theme that threads through them is looking at myths in cultural contexts as well as the beliefs that guide them. The first section, “Part I: Formal Essays” and the second section, “Part II: Essays on Culture and Psyche” contain both academic presentations as well as op-ed pieces published in Texas newspapers. Together, they offer two different rhetorical inflections on the ubiquity of myth and the energies that drive them. The cover of the book is a photograph I took of an older homesteader’s house in Big Bend National Park. Only the walls and a chimney are standing, witness to brave souls that farmed the land adjacent to the Rio Grande. I thought the monument they left was also part of the myth imbedded in this magnificent park in West Texas.

Is All News "Breaking"?

In structure, format and perhaps intention, what is loosely referred to as “the news” or “the news of the day” has changed significantly from the days of Cronkite, Murrow, Rather, Reynolds, Jennings, and the most notable teams, McNeill-Lehrer News Hour and the Huntley-Brinkley report. I recently asked myself a few basic questions amidst the news-glutted world we seem to be mired in, whatever our personal preferences: What is the news and who makes that decision? Who is the audience for any news story? What in every news story is to be remembered and what is insisted or encouraged to be forgotten through what the particular story highlights? What is a news story up to besides or in addition to the information it aims at deploying? Is its major intention entertainment more than it is informative?

Choose any news show with or without a panel of commentators huddled around a table of donuts; each is a particular brand of spun information; its engines of production or reproduction are powered by a certain mythology. By that term I mean a particular galaxy of beliefs, values, feelings and even ideologies and philosophies that it sells with the same alacrity as the ads that break the news into edible bites. Pose this question as you watch your favorite news show: what is the mythology that filters the information that promises to in-form me?

A few years ago, as I watched one of my favorite news/group conversation channels, I asked myself: what is this story or shaped conversation asking/insisting that I remember, that I carry around with me like a portable shoulder bag, and what stories or contents for discussion asking/insisting that I forget, not notice, leave by the side of the road as irrelevant to the story I am coached to remember?

The second question I posed to myself is not disconnected from the above. Regardless of the source of our news—magazines, newspapers, podcasts or other on-line sources, as well as one another—are we not only receiving in-form-ation, but also being re-shaped, re-formed and re-enforced by being in-formed? For “news” informs and shapes how we know—a particular way or via of knowing, which may be in many instances more powerful than what we know. And not just limited to knowledge but more and more how we are led to feel about what we know. News has become so feeling-toned in the contemporary world, that it often supersedes the information itself, much less a level of thoughtfulness.

Earlier I used the word mythology, which includes but spirals way beyond stories of ancient gods and heroes. Myths are more than that;  indeed, they are consciousness-shaping and altering. Myths have the capacity and the power to shape our awareness through the kinds of beliefs they propose that incubate in us. Each news channel works off of a very precisely delineated mythology to form the what/how of our perceptions of that increasingly slippery term, reality.

As to what we take in as news-worthy being either fallacious or valid—that depends on what mythology you care to feed most frequently and which you consciously or unconsciously choose to ignore or even defile. All news is sculpted, packaged and delivered both to construct a certain shaped reality while simultaneously either explicitly or overtly to debunk another version of that same news content.

To test the above, once a week watch a news channel that you generally ignore or debunk for reasons you can easily enunciate, and see how their presentation of “the news” pushes your ways of thinking and feeling buttons. Then you will feel viscerally the power of myth.

Being Uncertain About Uncertainty

Uncertainty continues to grow and expand and deepen around us, creating perhaps, its own virus, a virus in the heart. We hear the words today, “everything is so fluid and we don’t know what’s next.” My own levels of anxiety continue to rise, so I returned to one of my favorite books by a favorite writer to calm myself: When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by the Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron. In addition to her gift for bringing some fundamental ideas of Buddhism into the Western world, she was instrumental in founding and directing Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the first Tibetan monastery in North America specifically established for Westerners.

Rereading some select passages lately, I began to notice how her insights on impermanence seemed so applicable to many of our feelings of uncertainty and its first cousin, insecurity, today as the spread of the Corona virus weaves its way into all parts of the planet. I am relearning from Chodron how a pandemic does not have to lead to pandemonium unless we choose it allow it.

She asks us to consider another tact on our feelings of impermanence, going so far as to suggest that “Impermanence is the goodness of reality. . . . Impermanence is the essence of everything” and goes on to observe that “people have no respect for impermanence;. . . in fact, we despair of it. We regard it as pain. We try to resist it by making things that will last—forever.” In doing so, she claims, we can easily “lose our sense of the sacredness of life.”

My sense is that her remarks on impermanence strike close to the heart beat of uncertainty. In fighting either one, I can feel that my reference points in my daily life can be shaken, begin to fall apart and need to be reclaimed not by force but by yielding to and becoming curious about my relation with both impermanence and uncertainty.

I am curious at this stage how any of our reference points of our life can be seen as our reverence points—places in which the sacred-- what we treasure and value--have their most dramatic expressions. What I reference on a daily basis is what I reverence.

Chodron describes at one point how these can become focal points of wisdom, even opportunities to examine life-long habits of responding to them when they appear, which, if not in our current condition of uncertainty of where the virus will take all of us, then when? But her approach goes deeper: she suggests that if we can see ourselves nested within our feelings of impermanence and uncertainty from a place that is not ego-driven, then things transform vividly. Here is what she understands: “Egolessness is available all the time as freshness, openness, delight in our sense perceptions. . .  we also experience egolessness when we don’t know what’s happening. . . . We can notice our reactions to that.”

I find her observations worthy of exploration to be curiously comforting as I try to be more relaxed with the uncertainty that faces all of us each day around the planet: will there be enough money, food, health, health-care, cooperation, unity in the face of increasing adversity? When the same old patterns “of grasping and fixating” continue to drive us towards greater insecurity wherein the patterns are repeated with renewed gusto, we can, she notes at the end of her reflections, “relate to our circumstances with bitterness or with openness.”

Our greatest freedom may indeed reside in how we relate to the mess we feel around and perhaps within us.

An Attitude of Gratitude

Finding a medicine to arrest the Corona Virus in the body of those who test positive for it as well as a vaccine that will prevent it are both indispensable, and time is most important: the sooner the better.

In the meantime, something else strikes me as important in this global challenge—the attitude we each take up in our daily lives, which has to do with how we think about and respond to the virus’s threat. The Swiss psychiatrist and cultural mythologist, C.G. Jung (1875-1961), whose writings stretch across 20 volumes, offered an extensive description of the power and importance of the attitudes we carry into any daily situation, whatever its level of complexity and force.

Jung suggests that on its most basic level, an attitude is “a state of readiness.” The attitude we bring to any life situation will shape how we think about it, imagine it and respond to it. Attitudes are as important to our way of being as is our breathing.

As the virus unfolds globally and in our own nation, we hear or read of individuals or groups who live “as if” there is no virus or no systemic threat to them, even as it continues to kill thousands and incapacitate thousands of others. My estimates here may be woefully low.

Jung advises that we cannot perceive either the outer world or the inner world without a guiding attitude to help us navigate both terrains. I am learning that an attitude contours what we each select to claim as relevant and what we are inclined to leave along the side of the road as irrelevant, untrue, unimportant or simply non-existent.

Our habitual attitudes tend to gravitate towards what is familiar, has proven to be security-promoting and meaning-making, such that when a significant new reality, especially something as violent as the cv, we might tend to force it into the habitual attitude that sustains us so to lessen its destructive nature. When a habitual attitude will not budge, then any new reality must be persuaded to fit into its mold.

Of course, another possible option is that the individual or the collective shifts its attitude in order to apprehend more of the new content’s reality. The startling discovery here is that the attitude(s) that we cultivate figure largely into what reality we are capable of absorbing. A shift in attitude is also nothing less than a transformation of consciousness. Such a conversion means that one’s manner of selecting  a certain set of perceptions that comprise what one has decided to be conscious of, what is most important to pay attention to, to reflect or meditate on determines what reality one lives, and perhaps dies, by.

Something as massive as the current virus can push us to the edge of our comfort zone, and perhaps in some cases, shove us forcefully into a new attitudinal zone of awareness. Some may find themselves breaking the mold of an old attitude which has outlived its reassuring qualities. I ask myself with each news cycle and readings on this mysterious and ubiquitous entity:

What is my own attitude towards the virus?

How am I responding to it?

What am I willing to give up to contribute to arresting its spread?

Can I sacrifice parts of my life in order to serve a greater good?

C.G. Jung observed that depending on our attitude we can be swallowed up by the way we think and respond to any life situation, or we can be liberated by a shift in attitude, especially one that guides us to further self-understanding.

One attitude is clear that I share with others: the deep gratitude for all public servants in many professions whose attitude of serving others, even while risking their own lives, is unconquerable.

The Pull of Curiosity

A book I had bought years ago, brought home, shelved and forgot about, whispered to me the other morning that it was ready to be read. I obliged. It is called simply Curiosity by Alberto Manguel. I purchased it for the obvious reason that I was curious about what curiosity is, beyond my own understanding.

The author, from Buenos Aires, tells early on of walking home from yet another new school as a youth. He was tired of the same way home so, diverted by the powers of curiosity from his well-grooved pattern, took a side street and soon became lost. He could only offer in retrospect that he did not know why he diverged from his familiar path that day except that “I wanted to experience something new, to follow whatever clues I might find to mysteries not yet apparent” and this led him on an adventure that was less frightening than it was energizing because it exacted a feeling of wonder in him.

He also learned at a young age how reading could provide him untold divergences from the familiar. He realized what many of us have discovered: that reading always seems to include the acts of remembering, revising and renewing what we may have thought was in our lives settled and fixed-in-place for the duration.

As I continue to read his stimulating adventure, I began to consider that curiosity’s constant companion is consciousness itself, a certain degree of intensity to even arouse my wonder about something. Becoming curious, wondering, asking why, who, what is perhaps one of the most valued human gifts we hold and can cultivate in ourselves. When I need a refresher course, I visit our younger son’s family and always strike up a conversation with their older daughter, Eleanor, age 7; she is a wonder-filled child who wants to know why about everything. Her imaginative life is at full throttle right now and her love of learning to read is a consequence of such abundance. She renews my awakening to be curious.

Not wealth but wonder seems to be a signal of true abundance; or, said another way, wonder is one of our delightful forms of wealth. In his Introduction Mangel believes “we imagine in order to exist, and we are curious in order to feed our imaginative desires.”

But then he moves to a discussion that intrigued me further: “Imagination as an essential creative activity, develops with practice, not through successes. . .but through failures. His reasoning may surprise some: “failures force us, if we are curious enough, to try again, to pursue a different tact that may lead to new failures.” My own failures have always pushed me to question what I had been assuming and to revisit what I wish to achieve with a bit more humility.

Our culture has as one of its bumper stickers: “Failure is not an option.” I wonder where this idea came from, an idea that is actually harmful and unrealistic. Of course, learning to fail better runs against this popular and misleading motto.  

Failing can actually free us from the fantasies that gather around success in order to imagine more deeply and, depending on the trajectory of our curiosity, lead to unforeseen surprises and new ways of knowing what once seemed so familiar and ordinary.

But to the other side, a question:  are there people, things, situations, conditions, or beliefs that we should not only not be curious about, but also not question? To leave these arenas at the doorstep of “It is what it is.”? Maybe. I think, however, that whatever exists we have a right to be curious about, to question;  the danger of not doing so can lull us into  accepting what, finally, attests to be untrue.

It may be better to fail in our curiosity than to yield to what lacks sufficient veracity.

Review of Patrick Mahaffey's Integrative Spirituality

We might say, then, that the term ‘religion’ designates the attitude peculiar to a consciousness which has been changed by experience of the numinosum.”
—C.G. Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East (1958/1977, CW 11, p. 8)

Review of Patrick J. Mahaffey’s Integrative Spirituality: Religious Pluralism, Individuation, and Awakening, London, Routledge, 2019.

I am pleased to write this brief review of such a fine study by Patrick Mahaffey, co-chair of the Mythological Studies Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California His thoughtful and well-written contemplative and scholarly text grows directly from his own religious history through which he grew curious about many spiritual traditions. The breadth and scope of his study is revealed in the titles of his chapters; here are just a few to give you a sense of the book’s content: “The Spirit of the Times” (chapter 1); “Religious Pluralism, Spirituality and Stages of Faith” (chapter 2); “Hinduism” (chapter 4); “Buddhism” (chapter 5); “Awakening and Psychological Development” (chapter 8).

But lest the reader begin to think that this text is only about ideas of religious pluralism, they will be delightfully surprised by chapter, 9, entitled “Credo,” which I admit at the outset is my favorite in the book. For here the author outlines how he practices, for instance, a form of contemplative yoga called “Shaiva theology.” This form of yoga is only one, however, of many integrative practices that, while taking varied forms, all congeal for the author into one intention: “to cultivate balance, integration, peace within, and harmonious relationships with others” (203).

But one or several forms of embodied meditation does not mean that one spiritual practice fits all contemplatives. The author makes it clear in this chapter that “Spirituality is a matter of direct experience, and is, therefore, inherently personal. Each of us, I have maintained, must find our own way” (203). I understand Mahaffey’s study as less a Handbook than a Guide into one’s own spiritual landscape that is at once spiritual, poetic, mythic, psychological and autobiographical. In reading this carefully crafted text, the reader may discover, by the powers of analogy, one’s own path. Resonance with, rather than rote rigidity, is the preferred method of pilgrimage here.

From my perspective, the cornerstones—the two most prominent paths—in Mahaffey’s study are awakening (spiritual) and individuation (psychological), although the demarcation between them is thin indeed. Both of these paths, as the author shows with great nuance, assist in developing in the individual qualities of compassion, curiosity and coherence in one’s life by cultivating caring for otherness, difference, and the radical distinctness of each person as well as the dignity of the planet’s multiple and rich life forms.

It may be clear already, but is worth noting at this juncture, who the audience is for such a multiple religious exploration underscored by Jungian depth psychology as well as several founders of an assortment of spiritual practices. My sense is that it speaks to those who, while enmeshed happily in any one tradition, sense or see the intrinsic value of conversing with a host of other traditions in order to broaden and deepen one’s own. I understand Integrative Spirituality to be in the tradition of another favorite book of mine by the Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh: Living Buddha, Living Christ, which illustrates how two seemingly radically different traditions actually have much to say to one another within the fields of their respective beliefs that mutually enrich one another.

In that vein, Mahaffey’s introduction is one of the most important segments in the book; it is a crafted mosaic of disciplines emerging as part autobiography, part an expression of a developed sensibility after decades of practice,  contemplation and teaching. The quality of his integrative approach is witnessed especially in the way he continually integrates Jungian insights from the psychologist’s Collected Works as well his The Red Book to highlight Mahaffey’s artistic intertwining of several strands of spiritual and psychological insights into a coherent and persuasive whole. Underscoring the entire study is this declaration from the author: “My conviction is that real change comes from inner work, one person at a time, and cumulative changes in our inner world shape the conditions of our shared social reality. Therefore I have made the cultivation of interiority the primary focus of this book” (1).

I sense that Mahaffey is one of those souls who finds authentic joy in self-discovery and, by extension, discovery of the world, a joy that can be nurtured for a lifetime. He and his book are models of integrity and integration of profound wisdom gleaned and amplified from a host of sources. His rich bibliography contains over 150 sources, enough reading for a lifetime.